Baker says Trump's Twitter shot at TV anchor 'damages the office'

Friday

Jun 30, 2017 at 2:57 PMJun 30, 2017 at 3:17 PM

Matt Murphy/.State House News Service

BOSTON -- Joining a chorus of people denouncing President Donald Trump's latest personal broadside against a female television anchor, Gov. Charlie Baker on Friday called the president's latest act of Twitter aggression "inexcusable" and said he hopes Trump finally learns a lesson.

Trump, apparently upset with coverage of himself and his administration on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show, took to his favorite medium for unfiltered communication to criticize host Mika Brzezinksi in personal terms.

"I thought the president's tweets on 'Morning Joe' were inexcusable, inappropriate, appalling. And I sincerely hope he never does anything like that again," Baker said in an interview in his office.

Asked whether he had any degree of confidence that Trump would heed the admonishments coming from both sides of the aisle after his comments about Brzezinski, Baker said, "That's up to him."

Trump on Wednesday typed out a two-Tweet critique of 'Morning Joe' hosts Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.

"I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came....to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!" Trump wrote.

With a stronger penchant for immersing himself in the politics of policy over personality, Baker said working in public life means being able to accept different points of view.

"We should respect those we agree with and those we disagree with and stick to the issues, and this is as blatant an example of not doing that as I can think of," Baker said.

"And I think it damages the office. I think it damages public dialogue," he added.

MARIJUANA POTENCY CONCERNS

The governor, like most on Beacon Hill, was waiting Friday afternoon to see if House and Senate negotiators could reach compromise over a fiscal 2018 budget and legislation overhauling the voter-approved marijuana legalization ballot law.

A veteran of recent State House policy squabbles and those from his days in the Weld and Cellucci administrations, Baker said he wasn't overly concerned with the reality that the new fiscal year would begin Saturday without a finalized budget in place. Lawmakers and Baker have already agreed to a spending bill that would keep government funded through July.

"Some years the budget lands on June 22, some years it lands on July 22, some years it lands on Aug. 22. The commonwealth stills manages to find a way to function," Baker said.

In some ways, Baker said, the conference process is as much a "black hole" for him as it is the general public.

"Our role in this is to provide them with information as they ask for it, and that's pretty much what we've been doing," Baker said.

On marijuana, Baker said he is more concerned with controls on potency of edible products and packaging than he is the tax rate on retail pot sales, as long as the rate generates enough revenue to pay for government oversight.

"I've said all along that the tax rate is a lot less important to me than the local control, the packaging and the potency stuff," Baker said.

Though he said he would prefer to see a tax rate that's lower than the House's proposed 28 percent, he also acknowledged that the tax rate may need future adjustments and said it's always easier to lower a tax than it is to raise one.

"It needs to cover the cost of the program," Baker said.

Baker also said he tried to keep House and Senate leadership in the loop as he developed the comprehensive Medicaid reform package that he presented to conferees last week which includes an employer assessment worth $200 million to help balance the fiscal 2018 budget.

While he said he's open to modifications, he said the combination of the assessments and reforms to MassHealth intended to control the cost growth in the program were key to winning the support of the business community.

"I would worry if they broke it up too much," he said.

Baker has faced some criticism, including from Democratic candidates for governor, about his reluctance to file a revised budget to give conferees a road map since revenue assumptions used to build the House and Senate's roughly $40.3 billion spending plans for fiscal 2018 are not holding up.

State law requires a governor to resubmit a budget plan if revenues "materially decrease" in the time between a budget first getting filed in January and put in place for July 1.

The governor said economists have given budget writers a wide range of guesses about what will happen next year, and not all are nearly as dire as the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation's projection that the revenue gap could be as much as $1 billion.

"I don't think 1 percent in one direction is material. That's my view," he said, adding, "I would really like to give them the space to get to yes on their own terms with each other."